Re: [game-lang] a survey of previous work

[Simon McGregor <londonien@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'd like to make another proposal.

Let's see if we can all agree that our language ought to have access
(either as primitives or more likely as a standard library) to
game-level concepts like board spaces, movable pieces, decks of cards,
and so on. If so, we probably want slightly abstracted versions of
these with an inheritance hierarchy (e.g. a deck of cards is a
specific example of a randomly permutable list: one in which the items
have two sides and various other properties), but these aren't crucial
details.

These concepts simultaneously do three things:
1) they decompose the state-structure of the game into the states of
separate components
2) they abstract common types of state change (e.g. dealing a card on
a place, moving a piece from one space to another)
3) they provide sufficient information for a game interface to be constructed

[ N.B. I am not requesting 3); I am asserting that it is a logical
consequence of these game-level concepts. You can ignore 3) if you
don't agree with it :-) ]

If we agree that we want these concepts, we can move on to discussing
which ones we'll need and how they will work in the language.

My preference would be to have a game component description which is
conceptually distinct from both the rules and the presentation
(because it is a common factor to both). Other things being equal, I'd
also prefer to use the same language syntax for all three.

Simon
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